I have looked around and it seems that there is no way whatsoever to load external/remote URLs like http://google.com through the client browser using Javascript without using a proxy be it a PHP file in the server side or YQL which essentially uses the Yahoo API as a proxy. This is due to the same-origin policy.
I am not versed in Flash and I think that it might hold an answer because even though some people are agressively phasing it out, it has a lot of power.
My question: is there something I missed when searching? Free hosts have some restrictions on the amount of requests and the load on the server per unit time and I wouldn't like to get kicked out. Also my site scrapes some remote site's data so I wouldn't like to get blocked which I would get if I used a PHP proxy. So is there a simple Flash solution or Javascript solution I did not see?
No, this is not possible due to the Same origin policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy
Related
We have a unified portal which links multiple services through a jQuery tab based interface making use of iframes to display content from different services. Our portal runs on a secure server with HTTPS/SSL. While most of our external services are HTTPS, two of them aren't. Obviously we are aware of the issues with mixed content and we didn't like the idea of having non-https sites within the portal, but we didn't have a choice. Everything was ok until a few days ago when Google updated chrome to version 30, which now silently blocks mixed content.This has created a great number of problems for us. We contacted the external services and asked them if they could upgrade their services to HTTPS and one of them has come back saying they have no plans to do so for the next 2 years.
Obviously this is a problem. We tried getting around the problem by getting this service to open into a new browser window, but this is a rather inelegant workaround which I would like to get rid of, if at all possible. Is there any way that I can use AJAX or PHP to prefetch the page in question and then display it within the portal iframe without Chrome blocking it?
I would be very grateful for any advice at all. I do understand how bad an idea it is to mix secure content with non secure content, but I have no choice in the matter as my manager is adamant that the service have to be a part of the portal.
Thanks in advance.
Regards
Alex
A somewhat simple solution would be to use a reverse proxy. You can configure Apache quite easily to take an HTTPS connection, fetch the requested content from another URL and return it. See mod_proxy. The problem is that the browser will necessarily see a different URL/domain on its part (your reverse proxy), which may or may not cause problems with cookies or hardcoded links.
I'm using loadVars to load a PHP URL with lots of sensitive information required for the Flash application. Only problem is that URL can be accessed via a web browser which raises security issues if someone gets a hold of this URL. Is it possible to have the PHP page only accessible via my Flash application?
Appreciate the help!
Thanks
No, there is no way to limit a page to a specific app, browser or user agent, since all of those things can be mimicked. If you are passing around sensitive information then you need to do authentication and use encrypted data transfer (HTTPS).
Regardless of how you attempt to make it only accessible from your Flash application, a determined user will certainly be able to view the page also. It can be as simple as proxying the requests through an HTTP proxy like Charles, Firebug or Wireshark.
There are things that can be done to make it more difficult to figure out what the data is from viewing the page directly. For instance, you can encrypt the data or output it as binary. But since SWF is an open sourced format, users can use decompilers or just inspect the ABC (Actionscript Byte Code) to see what is really going on.
The short answer is NO, you cannot protect the information available to the client side (Flash) from being accessible from other clients.
As long as you have a page on HTTP, a determined user can always find a way around any user-agent restrictions imposed by you.
One way to protect the data (other than using HTTPS) is to encrypt it at the server, send it over HTTP and then decrypt it in Flash using as3Crypto or some other cryptography library.
Hope this helps,
I'm trying to load an image dynamically. Seems like the server doesn't like me loading that image outside form their domain, so I always get with a 404, when in fact Firebug seems to load it and FF as well.
What's the best approach to remove the referrer header from the GET request sent to the server via the browser? I was thinking about a PHP proxy, but I will be happy if I can accomplish this using JavaScript.
I'm using Mootools.
You cannot do this with JavasSript because it is a violation of the same origin policy. Checking the referer is a good method for preventing bandwidth theft and thats one of its few good security uses. If an attacker controls the browser the referer and the rest of the HTTP Header can be controlled with TamperData. If all of thoughs jpg's are killing your $4/mo unlimited bandwidth from some random shared host, perhaps a free image host will fill your needs.
I have already heard about the curl library, and that I get interest about...
and as i read that there are many uses for it, can you provide me with some
Are there any security problems with it?
one of the many useful features of curl is to interact with web pages, which means that you can send and receive http request and manipulate the data. which means you can login to web sites and actually send commands as if you where interacting from your web browser.
i found a very good web page titled 10 awesome things to do with curl. it's at http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/10-awesome-things-to-do-with-curl
One of it's big use cases is for automating activities such as getting content from another websites by the application. It can also be used to post data to another website and download files via FTP or HTTP. In other words it allows your application or script to act as a user accessing a website as they would do browsing manually.
There are no inherent security problems with it but it should be used appropriately, e.g. use https where required.
cURL Features
It's for spamming comment forms. ;)
cURL is great for working with APIs, especially when you need to POST data. I've heard that it's quicker to use file_get_contents() for basic GET requests (e.g. grabbing an RSS feed that doesn't require authentication), but I haven't tried myself.
If you're using it in a publicly distributed script, such as a WordPress plugin, be sure to check for it with function_exists('curl_open'), as some hosts don't install it...
In addition to the uses suggested in the other answers, I find it quite useful for testing web-service calls. Especially on *nix servers where I can't install other tools and want to test the connection to a 3rd party webservice (ensuring network connectivity / firewall rules etc.) in advance of installing the actual application that will be communicating with the web-services. That way if there are problems, the usual response of 'something must be wrong with your application' can be avoided and I can focus on diagnosing the network / other issues that are preventing the connection from being made.
It certainly can simplify simple programs you need to write that require higher level protocols for communication.
I do recall a contractor, however, attempting to use it with a high load Apache web server module and it was simply too heavy-weight for that particular application.
I have a website where most of the traffic comes from the API (http://untiny.com/api/). I use Google Analytics to collect traffic data, however, the statistics do not include the API traffic because I couldn't include the Google Analytics javascript code into the API pages, and including it will affect the API results. (example: http://untiny.com/api/1.0/extract/?url=tinyurl.com/123).
The solution might be executing the javascript using a javascript engine. I searched stackoverflow and found javascript engines/interpreters for Java and C, but I couldn't find one for PHP except an old one "J4P5" http://j4p5.sourceforge.net/index.php
The question: is using a javascript engine will solve the problem? or is there another why to include the API traffic to Google Analytics?
A simple problem with this in general is that any data you get could be very misleading.
A lot of the time it is probably other servers making calls to your server. When this is true the location of the server in no way represents to location of the people using it, the user agent will be fake, and you can't tell how many different individuals are actually using the service. There's no referrers and if there is they're probably fake... etc. Not many stats in this case are useful at all.
Perhaps make a PHP back end that logs IP and other header information, that's really all you can do to. You'll at least be able to track total calls to the API, and where they're made from (although again, probably from servers but you can tell which servers).
I spent ages researching this and finally found an open source project that seems perfect, though totally under the radar.
http://code.google.com/p/serversidegoogleanalytics/
Will report back on results.
you would likely have to emulate all http calls on the server side with whatever programming language you are using..... This will not give you information on who is using it though, unless untiny is providing client info through some kind of header.
if you want to include it purely for statistical purposes, you could try using curl (if using php) to access the gif file if you detect untiny on the server side
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingTroubleshooting.html#gifParameters
You can't easily do this as the Javascript based Google Analytics script will not be run by the end user (unless of course, they are including your API output exactly on their display to the end user: which would negate the need for a fully fledged API [you could just offer an iframable code], pose possible security risks and possibly run foul of browser cross-domain javascript checks).
Your best solution would be either to use server side analytics (such as Apache or IIS's server logs with Analog, Webalizer or Awstats) or - since the most information you would be getting from an API call would be useragent, request and IP address - just log that information in a database when the API is called.